Words are inadequate

Ah, back to playing Devil's Advocate for the Right.

First, while the claim of "indefinite detention without a trial" may evoke the image of locking someone up and throwing away the key, it just means that there is no set date when these people will be released. The U.S. has effectively declared war on the Taliban/Iraq/al Qaida, and realistically those conflicts are still on-going, at least at a low level. These prisoners could still be considered "prisoners of unconventional war," a sort of limbo between criminal prisoners and military prisoners. I am under the impression that evidence obtained by the CIA using illegal methods or by other countries who engage in torture are not admissible in court, thus the argument could be made that the lack of evidence to charge a prisoner with a crime is not evidence of the prisoner's innocence.

Second, I would argue that the indefinite-detention/extraordinary-rendition scandals create something of a catch-22. I think it should be obvious that if we send a Saudi held in Guantanamo Bay back to Saudi Arabia because we no longer believe he is a threat, he will be tortured by Saudi authorities under the suspicion that he is an Islamic terrorist. After all, the U.S. held him as a suspected terrorist, and the Saudi Royal Family has as much to fear from Islamic terrorists as Saddam Hussein did. Therefore, until a political solution can be found, if a political solution can be found, this is a step towards creating a prison with better accomodations for the prisoners. This would be the other aspect of not having a set date to release the prisoner.